Hegemony and socialist strategy: for a radically democratic politics

The publication of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy will make available to readers of political theory another seminal work that has significantly shaped the field over the past thirty years. It contains an explanation of all the fundamental concepts that Laclau and Mouffe later work with and develop. Here they clarify aspects of what they call social logic and provide an anti-essentialist interpretation of the social (not society). < br> Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is situated within the Marxist and post-Marxist debates of its time and develops the controversies and concepts in this area. However, current discussions about left-wing political strategies are based more on theories of new social movements, global justice, and discussions about deliberative and participatory democracy than on reflections on the transformations of social democratic parties in 19th and 20th century Europe. The readership for genealogies of the concept of hegemony in this sense is therefore relatively limited in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but over time it may gain supporters in the field of intellectual history. The reading and intellectual public will then probably be able to appreciate, that the historical development of the left should not be understood as an inevitable path to extinction, but also based on interpretations, like the one in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, understand the left as a hegemonic political force transforming the political sphere, relations between the state, party and individual in general.